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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
IN THE FALL OF 1873 Joseph Arch, the President of the England's National Agricultural Labourers' Union (NALU), embarked on a mission to scout Canada as an emigration destination. He was received with much hospitality in Canada. Large-scale migration of British farm-workers had the support of an extraordinary consensus between the NALU, Canadian political and business elites, and the Toronto labour leaders who wielded enormous influence over the labour movement in Ontario. The consensus was the result of developments in British agricultural unionism, Ontario's farming sector, Canada's immigration policy, and the Toronto labour establishment's approach to immigration. However, during the mission, tensions emerged between Arch and the Toronto labour establishment that strained the appearance of international union solidarity. These tensions revealed the treacherous nature of a relationship between labour leaders in an immigrant-receiving country, and an organization, even a union, looking to promote emigration.
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IN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER of 1873, two visitors from Britain enjoyed eager audiences and glamorous receptions from Canada's political and business elite. The Governor General Lord Dufferin, Prime Minister Macdonald, Official Opposition leader Alexander Mackenzie, Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat, a host of business leaders, Dominion and provincial cabinet ministers, and senior bureaucrats made a point of meeting personally with the visitors and of presenting themselves as enthusiastic partners in their enterprise. (1) One of the visitors declared in a speech that the Governor General himself "listened as attentively to what [I] had to say as if I had been the Archbishop of Canterbury." (2) According to the other visitor, no expense was spared by their hosts: "Our hotel bills were discharged. Free passes over the railroads were given to us. Carriages were placed at our disposal ... efficient guides were deputed to facilitate our researches." (3)
The visitors were not royalty, diplomats, or prominent members of the British business class, aristocracy, or political elite. Rather, they were representatives of a union: Joseph Arch, the president of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union (NALU), and Arthur Clayden, a middle-class supporter of the NALU, and a member of its "Consultative Committee." (4)
What made the reception for Arch and Clayden even more remarkable was that in the fall of 1873, Canada's politicians and media already had plenty on their minds. The government of John A. Macdonald was--correctly--viewed to be on the verge of collapse due to the Pacific scandal. Almost every day brought either more testimony by senior officials in Macdonald's government before the Commission of Inquiry, or news regarding preparations for the showdown coming when Parliament reopened at the end of October. (5) The financial panics in the United States and Britain created deep concern about the economy. Anxious stories of business failures and rising unemployment in America filled the papers. (6) In October, the capture of one of Louis Riel's lieutenants, Ambroise Lepine, re-opened the fractious debate about the first uprising in the north-west. (7)
Moreover, Canadian unions and their leaders had not achieved the same strength and status as they had in Britain or the United States. It was just the year before that workers had mounted their first coordinated, multi-regional movement, the Nine-Hour campaign, and that unions had won some legal standing through the Trades Union Act. But even these breakthroughs came with qualifications. The momentum of the Nine-Hour movement was sapped by the Toronto printers' strike, and the activities of unions were limited by the Criminal Law Amendment Act. (8) The only labour paper in the new Dominion, the Toronto Trade Assembly's Ontario Workman, was surviving only because of under-the-table subsidies of Prime Minister Macdonald. (9) The Workman stood as one of the few outlets for labour to counter the attacks of hostile employers, particularly of George Brown, a father of Confederation, great advocate of laissez-faire liberalism, leader of the opposition to the Toronto printers' strike, and owner of one of Canada's most prominent newspapers, the Toronto Globe.
Moreover, as Gregory Kealey observes, Canada's first national central, the Canadian Labour Union (CLU), was little more than a regional body, "an extension of the Toronto Trades Assembly (TTA)." (10) The CLU's inaugural convention, which took place during Arch's visit, attracted only 44 delegates--few from outside Toronto--and little press or political attention. (11) The limited scope of the labour movement reflected the slow and uneven spread of industrialization in Canada. In particular, as Craig Heron has shown, only a few trades in Ontario, such as printing, barrel-making, shoe-making, and the building trades, were sufficiently developed to allow for craft unions to be firmly established. (12) As the lists of CLU delegates confirms, organizations from about eight trades dominated the movement--printers, moulders, coopers, shoemakers, machinists, cigarmakers, tailors, and bricklayers. (13) According to Kealey, a Toronto-based labour elite (which he calls a "junta" but which I will call an "establishment") (14) emerged from some of these trades to wield enormous influence over the movement in Ontario. The voice of labour thus came largely from a few people--particularly from Toronto Typographical Union leaders James Williams (editor of the Ontario Workman) and James McMillan (co-founder of the Workman), Coopers International Union vice-president John Hewitt, and future International Bricklayers Union vice-president Andrew McCormack.
What generated the hospitality for Arch and Clayden, despite the crowded political agenda and the uneven development of Canada's industries and labour movement, was the purpose of their visit: to scout the Dominion as a destination for large-scale emigration of English farm workers. For Canada's business and political leaders, attracting immigrants with agricultural skills and experience was a top priority. As a number of scholars have shown, by 1873 Canada was desperate for immigrants to settle vacant lands, and especially to provide labour on established farms. 15 "We want, and grievously want, the very class that Mr. Arch represents," declared the Ottawa Times. (16) Even George Brown's Globe set aside its animosity for unions and portrayed the NALU leaders as potent allies to be courted: "[T]hey will, we are sure, be treated everywhere with kindness due to their position in the movement they represent, and the importance of the mission they have undertaken." (17)
The basic story of the NALU mission has been told by a number of historians. Early on, Arch and Clayden were discouraged by what they found in Canada. They did not hide their disappointment at the "backwardness" of agriculture in Quebec and the poverty suffered by settlers in parts of northern Ontario such as Muskoka. But their spirits were lifted when they toured southern Ontario, where they were impressed with the opportunities that seemed available for NALU members wishing to migrate. Hence, Arch completed agreements with both the Ontario and Federal governments,
under which roughly 2,500 to 4,000 NALU members arrived in Canada. (18)
While significant, this influx was not enough to make a lasting impact on Canadian immigration history. The economic slump and setbacks of the NALU in Britain rapidly dimmed hopes for a massive emigration system managed by the union, and discussion of the NALU's plans became scarce in Canadian sources by early 1874. Nevertheless, Arch's visit provides a valuable opportunity to Canadian labour historians.
Indeed, the reception given Arch and Clayden made their visit a unique episode in Canadian history. At what other time did the Dominion's elite rush forward to welcome union officials from overseas, and to endorse and facilitate their efforts? An extraordinary sense (however brief) of common interest emerged between Canadian political and business leaders, and a union representing marginalized British farm-workers. Even more noteworthy was that the Toronto labour establishment was part of the consensus. Whereas most Canadian labour leaders during the late 19th and early 20th centuries were almost constantly hostile toward large-scale immigration and particularly toward promoters of immigration schemes, the Toronto labour establishment's views on the issue were ambivalent. Toronto labour leaders supported large-scale immigration in principal, viewing it as essential to national development, but were often bitterly critical of the government's existing recruitment and promotional systems. The labour establishment saw Arch's mission as both a resolution to this difficult balancing act, and a vindication of its position that the best way to recruit immigrants was to make Canada known internationally for offering "a fair system" to workers and their unions. Moreover, Arch's mission made it possible to believe that immigration could become a boon to labour, a means by which a union in the "mother country" would oversee the infusion of vast numbers of committed union members to Canada's population. The first section of this paper will trace developments in British agricultural labour activism, Ontario's farming sector, Canada's immigration policy, and the Toronto labour establishment's approach to immigration, to show how this broad consensus was forged.
The second section will explore the tensions that developed during the mission between Arch and the Toronto labour establishment, tensions that reveal the treacherous nature of a relationship between labour leaders in an immigrant-receiving country, and an organization, even a union, looking to promote emigration. In fact, just a few weeks after looking to the NALU's mission with such confidence and expectation, the Toronto labour establishment found itself pleading with Arch to acknowledge the recent struggles of Canadian unions, and to recognize some members of Canadian elites, particularly George Brown, as enemies in those struggles. As a result, the Toronto Trade Assembly's reception for Arch, held near the end of his visit, threatened to become an ugly showdown rather than a shining illustration of the bonds Canadian unionists had claimed to share with their British "brothers."
The Common Ground
Joseph Arch came to Canada on the heels of rising from an itinerant hedger and local Methodist preacher in Warwickshire (in central England) to the leading figure in a campaign to improve the lot of a "downtrodden" people. Farm labourers were seen as among the most oppressed groups in English society. Through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there emerged a process of "pauperization" of agricultural workers, whereby they went from "upright members of the community, with a distinct set of rights, into inferiors dependent on the rich." (19) The process was driven by massive population growth, the consequent pressure on the land, the expansion of commercial farming to feed the booming domestic market, and the "enclosures" of lands held in common (converting them into private property). An insurrection against this pauperization in the 1830s was decisively suppressed by force, and while the mid- 19th century was a"golden age" for landowning farmers, conditions for agricultural workers remained generally miserable. (20)
The NALU was the most important organization to emerge from a new surge in rural labour activism in the late 1860s and the 1870s. The surge was inspired in part by anger over decades of poor wages and conditions, and by new organizing and agitation by urban unions, which had achieved such gains as the legalization of unions through the British Trade Union Act of 1871. By early 1872, a host of local organizations had sprouted up around the English countryside, but it was an organizing drive and a strike--which its leaders dubbed a "revolt"--in Warwickshire that stimulated the most excitement. Arch deserved much of the acclaim he would receive for leading the "revolt," as he rounded up new members and rallied them behind the strike with a zeal and determination that reflected his background as a fiery Methodist preacher. (21)...
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